


Burns Out Another's Burning

by Lomonaaeren



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-21
Updated: 2012-05-21
Packaged: 2017-11-05 17:51:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/409285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The War of the Fire, as it was for Harry and Draco.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burns Out Another's Burning

**Author's Note:**

> Written for okydoky in the 2010 round of hd_holidays. She requested Harry and Draco in a wartime romance, with no major character death. Beta-d by L and C, and Britpicked by nursedrarry. The title is from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, "One fire burns out another's burning,/ One pain is lessen'd by another's anguish."
> 
> Warnings for angst, violence, pure-blood racism, non-linear narrative, and odd POV.

The smell of smoke was in the air. Then again, Harry was beginning to forget the time when it hadn't been. 

He Apparated onto the small hill east of Hogwarts and stood there shivering. The landscape around him was a dim, dull green, not unusual for spring--except that it was summer, when the should have been a _little_ deeper. Harry wasn't asking for much. Just for something that looked alive.

Not doable, of course, not when the air was as cool as in March and the haze of clear smoke covered the sky. Harry tipped his head back to squint, and flinched when the sun briefly broke through the haze. The sunbeams were stabbing, as transparent as the smoke, white and hurtful to the eyes.

_I'm imagining things,_ Harry told himself firmly, as he took off his glasses and scrubbed them in his shirt. He had to be. Because if the Fire had affected the sun itself, then Harry didn't think they had much hope.

A crack cut the air behind him before he could drop too far into brooding. Harry turned with his hand on his wand, but it was Malfoy who stood there--well, Draco, call him that, given that everyone would forever associate his last name with the beginning of this war--and he looked the same he always did. 

_Will I know when he changes?_ Harry thought, but since he stepped closer and Draco didn't immediately try to kill him, he decided that Draco hadn't transformed yet.

"What information do you have for me?" he asked. His throat was dry. He coughed, and then cast the charm that had become automatic for everyone who wasn't a pure-blood by now, the charm that moved the smoke away far enough to clear a space for breathing.

Draco stood still, studying him. He wore robes of a nondescript colour between black and grey, like everyone else, because it was less likely to show ash and char. His hair was cropped short, with singed ends. Harry glanced at it and then away. That hadn't happened long ago, and he didn't like to think about _how_ it had happened.

His eyes--

It was best not to think about the entirely unnatural light in his eyes.

"My father lost the last of his left arm yesterday," Draco said. It was an odd beginning to a conversation that should have been about strategy, or so Harry knew that others would have found it, but a tribute to what had blossomed between them, no matter how twisted it was and unlikely to endure. Harry shut his eyes for two seconds in acknowledgment of that.

"And what else?" Harry asked.

"Rabastan is the next one who's going to try a raid," Draco said. He pulled out a small square of parchment that Harry took from him with flinching fingers. Draco's skin was warmer than normal, and as pleasant as he sometimes found that, he knew it would be burning hotter than he could stand right now. "He's found out about that little cache of Mudbloods that you're keeping in Sussex."

Harry ignored the use of the word that Draco would never stop saying, because he claimed that he needed to keep in practice for the days when he was near his father. "How?" he demanded. "Do we have another traitor?"

"No," Draco said. "Unless you consider stupidity a treasonous act. I found out yesterday that one of them was venturing out to see his daughter in Surrey. Rabastan found him and traced him back."

Harry closed his eyes again. This time, it wasn't a tribute to anything, just a gesture of pure weariness. "Fuck." 

"But now that you know about it, the raid won't happen," Draco said. "Now you can stop Rabastan in time. I think I deserve a reward for that, don't you?" The presence of warmth on Harry's face said that he was leaning closer.

Harry answered with his hands and his mouth. They made more sense than his words did, most of the time, or at least so Draco assured him in broken moans when he lay on his back with Harry swallowing around his cock.

*

There had been two great events in Draco's life, two facts that changed him. One he knew the exact beginning of: the night his father awakened the Fire, and it reached out and claimed Draco as part of itself, a future part, because of his connection to the Malfoy bloodline. He was the heir of the Fire. It was the reason he couldn't simply throw his father over and leave, because it could touch him wherever it was, and remaining near and tending to Lucius at least ensured that he died more slowly, giving Draco a few more months of freedom.

The other, he didn't know the beginning of. But he was _sure_ that he'd never felt a stirring of sexual desire for Potter before the night when he made contact with him, three days after the war began--they were calling it the War of the Fire, which Draco thought was a stupidly simple name--and he came to offer his services as a possible spy, because that might delay the day the Fire claimed him. That was the night he found Potter sitting in a tent, leaning back in a chair with one foot up on a table, listening to a stream of reports from the people who had chosen him as their leader because, Draco supposed, he'd been their leader in the last war, and why break with tradition?

He was the only one who looked halfway calm or sane, the one fixed point in the spinning world. Draco accepted him then and there as the only one _worth_ desiring, because at least Potter wouldn't run around like a headless chicken and get the spurting blood all over Draco.

But the desire in general? That might go back years. Draco wasn't sure. Every time he tried to pin a beginning on it, it seemed that he got another memory of a time that he _might_ have wanted something from Potter. Except that he didn't know for certain, because if there was one precept he hadn't followed when he was a child, it was "know thyself." 

Yes, he had been a selfish little shit once upon a time. He had admitted it privately, since he had never been one for public flagellation unless he got to hold the whip, and gone on with his life. Everyone could live differently, since the war. Those ridiculous songs the Weird Sisters sang and the fawning letters printed in the _Daily Prophet,_ all about Potter's heroic goodness, had that core of truth to them. Things had changed.

Until his father had chosen to crawl into the bowels of the Manor and wake up one of the artefacts that had been sleeping for centuries, because there were some things that even Malfoy ancestors should know better than to play with.

*

It was called the Fire because that was what it was, great as the world, as the marble chamber that contained it. Or not quite as great, because it left a small space of bare stone near the front where someone could stand, but nearly so. 

And it burned. All the time. Hot, and white, and clear. It smouldered without kindling. It burned without fodder. It steamed and soared to heaven, a quiet conflagration, the crackling of which couldn't be heard beyond the doors.

White for sacrifice. White for heat.

White for purity. 

And Lucius Malfoy, weak with starvation and insanity after escaping from Azkaban, wanting revenge on his enemies so desperately that he ignored the warnings that his forebears had laid down in numerous diaries and letters and ledgers, crawled into the chamber and reached out his hands. He was free from Azkaban. He probably thought this was a way to make the people who had put him there feel as imprisoned as he had.

Of course, after the Fire claimed him, he was part of a bondage more profound than the mortal-constructed walls of Azkaban could have offered. But that was life.

Or life-in-death.

*

Harry brushed away fantasies of Draco and leaned forwards. Rabastan had finally shown up, just when Harry had thought the raid might occur another night. Dawn touched the edge of the horizon and threw the pathetic group of buildings that housed the Muggleborn refugees into sharp relief.

Of course, there was also a certain symmetry to attacking at dawn, Harry thought idly. It was the time that people might be deeply asleep or just stirring, believing themselves safe on some primal level because they had survived the night. A Death Eater--or the Burners, as they got called now--might decide it was the perfect time to show them that they were never safe.

A year ago, that thought wouldn't have occurred to Harry. He owed Draco a lot.

_Including a spectacular orgasm._

Harry shook his head and leaned further forwards to focus on Rabastan as he shuffled past. Yes, it was him. Harry had heard reports over the past year that he was dead, but they'd never been confirmed, and anyway, he trusted Draco more than someone in the Battle of Hogwarts who had seen someone who vaguely looked like Rabastan fall over and hadn't seen him get back up again.

Harry waited, another thing that Draco had taught him, while his eyes adjusted and Rabastan looked around for watchers. One thing Harry had perfected was the Disillusionment Charm; they just fought over too much territory that had too much open ground without cover. Rabastan smiled and lifted his hand.

It held what looked like a white diamond, of course, filled with a sheer and savage fire. The Burners' hands always did.

Harry waited. He had to be careful and strike at precisely the right moment. Otherwise, Rabastan would drop the diamond in the scuffle, or Harry might have to touch it with his bare skin. That…would be bad.

Rabastan whispered something under his breath. Harry no longer bothered to listen to the Burners' prayers, if that was what they were. The ones who followed Lucius were so far gone in their hatred of Muggleborns, in their ability to destroy them in a direct fashion in a way that Voldemort never could have, that they were basically cultists.

Rabastan opened his hand to throw the diamond.

Harry spoke the words with quiet force. His response to the raids--and the responses of the people he had trained--depended as much on cunning and sneakiness as the raids themselves did. There was no sense in informing the Burners of your presence, and no survival in letting that diamond touch the ground. " _Non comparere articulo._ " 

The air between and Rabastan and him turned blue and solid, like a wall. Harry wondered if he would be able to reach out and feel the smoothness of the ice if he wanted to. His body shook with the rush of the magic out of him, and it was a long moment, as always, before he could catch his breath and see if it had worked.

Of course, he probably would have known if it hadn't. The world would have vanished in utter, burning white.

The exhaustion passed, and yes, Rabastan was standing there in a closed, icy web of time made visible, his hand raised and his eyes wild and his hair straggling behind him. The diamond had vanished from his hand.

Harry smiled shakily and whispered the next part of the incantation. " _Coniungo te tempore._ " 

The blue ice shuddered and melted. For a moment, a bright flicker danced around Rabastan, and Harry knew that the diamond was trying to struggle back into existence. But his will and his spell held firm, and the frozen moment passed for Rabastan, leading him to re-join the normal stream of time. Harry could use more ordinary spells now.

" _Stupefy. Silencio. Incarcerous. Expelliarmus._ " 

Rabastan fell over, and his wand flew into Harry's hand. Harry slipped it into a special sealed pocket in the lining of his robe where he kept all the wands that he collected from Burners and bent down so that he could check the ropes binding Rabastan. Of course it would be perfect; most of his simple spells were, when he had practiced them this long in the laboratory of the war. You got good at the simple hexes and spells that could change the tide of a battle, as well as the more complicated ones necessary to defeat the Fire, or you didn't survive.

Yes, the ropes tied his limbs in the usual patterns. Harry rose to his feet with a grunt and slung Rabastan over a shoulder.

When he turned around, Draco stood behind him.

Harry hissed to conceal his own surprise and control the wild beating of his heart. "Draco," he said coldly. "I reckon that you couldn't have _told_ me you were there, and saved me the possibility of cursing you in surprise?" He cast a Lightening Charm on Rabastan. You wouldn't think that someone who looked half-starved could be so heavy.

Draco gave him a smile that wouldn't have looked out of place on a wolf. Harry could see the truth in his gleaming eyes, though, and took a quick step nearer to him. "What is it?" he demanded.

"This was only a distraction raid," Draco said softly. "I didn't know until this morning, but the Burners planned a bigger one on your camp itself." 

Harry stared at him, his stomach cramping up. "But there's no way they could have known where that was," he whispered. "No way at all, unless…" He swallowed.

"Yes," Draco said. "It seems that there is a traitor in your ranks after all." He spoke gently, and reached out as though he intended to support Harry with one hand on his shoulder. But he drew it back again. Harry wondered idly if Draco was worried about burning him, or if he just didn't want to violate the boundaries of their odd relationship with a careless gesture.

Harry closed his eyes and ran the list of names over in his head. Who knew about the camp? Who would tell? But he ended up shaking his head, because all of them were people it would pain him to admit were traitors, and the more important thing was the attack.

"Apparating," he told Draco, and turned around.

Draco's arm clamped into place over his shoulders like an iron bar. "Where do you think you're going?" he demanded when Harry looked at him in astonishment. "You thought I would let you _leave_ like that, when you're going into danger more severe than you usually do, and you haven't yet thanked me for the information? What happens if you're killed, I'd like to know?" 

Harry smiled in spite of himself, but he knew what his answer had to be. "Your company would be welcome," he said. "You know you can't be seen with me, though. Your father would suspect the truth immediately, and declare you a traitor to the Fire." 

"Who said that _I_ would be the one going with you?" Draco responded, and then muttered something under his breath. His face flowed and reshaped itself, glowing white from the inside. Harry wanted to look away, but forced himself to continue gazing until Draco had formed himself into a normal-looking, dark-haired wizard. 

It was the Fire that gave him his abilities, marked him like that and rendered him different. Harry might find the results disgusting, but if Draco could put up with having that flame inside him, Harry could put up with watching the effects.

"Protecting my investment," Draco said, leaning near enough that Harry could feel his breath like a kiss, and Apparating them that way. 

*

So there he was, pulled between his father, who had awakened the thing that could destroy them both and which demanded their attention, and this Potter who had picked up the mantle of Saviour with a great deal less complaining than Draco would have expected of him. He had known that Potter, when he was younger, did a great deal of moaning about how it wasn't _fair_ , and no one could understand what he went through, and fate should find someone else, but he wasn't doing that this time.

Draco wondered if being allowed the choice was all that mattered to Potter, really.

He made the choice to take Draco on as a spy, and although the people around him scowled and snapped and made smart remarks about spies who play both sides against the middle whenever they thought Draco couldn't hear them, most of them didn't try to interfere. Draco made short work of those who tried, or Potter did. A glare from those green eyes was better than a scolding, really. Most of the people around him--who called themselves the Order of the Phoenix or Dumbledore's Army for old time's sake--would flatten themselves to the earth and slink around at a disappointed glance from Potter.

And they would do anything to get back in his good graces again, even be nice to Draco.

Draco reckoned choices mattered to him, too, because although he couldn't break free of the Fire and leave it and his father behind forever, he could get some of his own back with the information he reported to Potter. He gave him news about raids, about the new tactics that the Fire would occasionally try--though those consisted, in the main, of breaking off slightly larger pieces of itself and sending them along with the Burners--and about the way the weather changed as the Fire burned in the world and cooled off the sun.

(Granger had said that the Muggles were beside themselves with that last. Apparently it violated all their predictions of how things were supposed to go. Draco didn't find that as funny as he once would have).

And he made the choice when he came in one night and found Potter alone in his tent, gazing at a golden chain in his hands with a faint smile. For once, there was no one around waiting to usher Draco away the instant he'd made his report. Draco sat down in the chair across from Potter and waited for him to look up.

Potter finally did, and when he did, he made no apologies about how he'd kept Draco waiting. Draco liked that. He put the golden chain carefully away and leaned forwards again, gaze on Draco. And he liked that, too, to be the centre of attention for someone so important, someone who had done _real_ deeds in war, now, instead of only defeating a Dark Lord through a combination of luck and magical coincidences.

"Did you have something that you wanted to say to me?" Potter asked. His voice was so mild that Draco knew it wouldn't matter if he didn't.

"Where did you get that chain?" Draco asked. "I've never seen you play with it before." 

Potter gave him a slight smile. _Still so relaxed,_ Draco thought in wonder. He wondered if it was because no news of raids had come for a week, or because he had been alone, which meant he had managed to dismiss his fawning courtiers. (Draco couldn't stand that. Yes, he appreciated Potter, too, but he knew better than to _fawn_. It would irritate Potter instead of getting him any closer).

"It's something I inherited from Sirius Black," Potter said. "I don't know what it was attached to originally. But I've seen him wearing it in a Pensieve that was hidden in the back of his room, during times when he was happy. Holding it makes me feel closer to him." 

Simple words, a simple answer, but a true one. Draco caught his breath, and wondered if Potter could hear his heart beating.

"How often did you think during the war with the Dark Lord that you would die?" he asked, which wasn't what he had meant to ask at all. It was too complicated a question for the simple silence between them. But he had spoken it now, and he wasn't going to retract it just because it might have made him feel more comfortable. 

Potter answered in the same manner that he had answered the question about the chain, setting Draco more at ease. "All the time. But not as often as you probably think that you're going to die. My fate was never as certain as yours is." 

His eyes were so bright. Draco stood up, and then stood there, silent, his heart still beating, unsure if he wanted to stay here where he was known, or run away.

Potter was the one who took the step in the end, coming up to meet Draco where he waited, reaching out one hand as if he wanted to cup it around the back of Draco's neck, and only then pausing and seeming to seek out with his eyes whether such a touch would be welcome. That his own heart was jumping, Draco could see from the harsh, fast pulse in his neck.

That gave him the courage to reach back, grabbing Potter and pulling him in until they rested chest to chest.

They didn't stay chest-to-chest for long. Potter kissed him, and Draco kissed back. Their tongues slid together with a faint rasping sound that Draco could barely hear over the blood leaping and pounding in his ears. He would have laughed aloud at the fact that he was so terrified over a little thing like kissing his former enemy, but he was too busy learning about the warmth at the corner of Potter's collarbone and shoulder, and the way his skin slipped and shuddered when Draco traced his fingers over it.

It didn't take them long to get rid of their clothes. They were both scared, Draco thought, but neither one of them would hesitate in front of the other, as if admitting their fear was the only thing that would make it real.

Their hands slid and clutched and twisted, and Draco didn't get the chance that he wanted to look at Potter's body fully in the firelight. Of course, by then he was already plotting that he would have other chances, so that didn't matter so much.

Potter had an intense look on his face as he conjured lube of some kind and then tossed his wand aside. Draco made a mental note not to roll over on it. That would be bad, to crush the wand of the Savior they were all depending on to rescue them from the Fire.

_And they say that my eyes are hard to look at, with the Fire burning in them. They've got nothing on his._

To distract himself from that thought, Draco cleared his throat and raised a sceptical eyebrow. "You know what to do, Potter? And here I thought I'd be tenderly guiding a gentle little virgin through the steps." 

"Oh? Thought about this often, have you?" Potter gave him a merciless smile as he reached down and slid his fingers into Draco's arse.

Draco arched his back and caught his breath, half-closing his eyes. "Not so rough," he breathed out. 

"Right," Potter said, though from the half-sceptical tone Draco didn't think he was really addressing _him_ , and modified the stroking of his fingers, taking one out. Draco hissed and opened an eye to look at him.

"You can put that back," he said. "My comment had to do with your speed, not with the number of fingers that you might choose to honour by sticking them up this royal arse." 

"Ron would be _so_ glad to hear you call yourself that," Potter said, slipping sideways so that he could adjust the angle of his wrist. Draco arched his back a second time and thought how unfair it was that, along with all the other gifts she had chosen to give him, Nature had endowed Potter with the ability to find a bloke's prostate the first time. "Confirms all his predictions." 

"Does _this_?" Draco hooked his feet behind Potter's ankles and dragged him closer.

"Not…exactly." 

Potter's voice was more than slightly breathless, and he lined up his cock with Draco's entrance using a care that at least made it clear he was taking the privilege seriously, as he should be. Draco relaxed by force and waited for the burn that would signal Potter's first thrust.

It was more like a sting, when it came, a sharp bite that travelled all the way from his legs to his chest and made him gasp. Potter paused, halfway inside him, and stared down. Draco saw the word his lips started to form. Potter was going to ask if he was all right.

"Yes!" Draco snarled back, and never gave him the chance to ask it. He pushed himself backwards instead, to prove that he was.

Then there was the burn, and Potter's breathless laughter, shared with him instead of directed at him, and Draco rested his head on the floor of the tent and reflected that they hadn't even taken the time to conjure a blanket beneath them, or use their clothes to make it softer. It was hard ground they fucked on, a hard time they fucked in.

The Fire burned behind Draco's eyes, beneath Draco's skin, and would consume him when it was done killing his father.

He reached up and rested one hand on Potter's arm, releasing the control that he kept strict and tight most of the time. Potter gasped, his head tossing back and his eyes crossing. His body never stopped moving, though, which Draco approved of. Potter had his priorities in the right place.

Most of the time. He thought of the balked question.

"The Fire?" Potter whispered the word as though it would hear them, which, for all Draco knew, it might. He nodded back and resumed his control again, only to abandon himself more fully to the merciless tenderness of Potter's treatment.

He moved like a dancer, not like someone trained but like someone so in tune with his body that he and it were full partners. Draco had seen him move the same way on his broom. He watched in breathless envy and desire and something like adoration--and hatred. If Potter hadn't been so _stupid,_ they could have had this a long time ago.

Potter's body curved, a dancer's at the top of his flight. He uttered a tiny, constrained whimper, the kind of sound that someone would make when they were surprised by something. Or so Draco thought; he had to admit that he hadn't ever noticed Potter's vocalizations during sex.

He hadn't spied on him then. Not for want of trying, of course.

Potter thrust, and then they were hurtling, both of them, a second fire rising from Draco's groin to make his limbs tingle and weaken. He welcomed it, since he had been so long alone with the other one, and when a whirlwind of white and gold opened in front of him, beneath him, above him, he willingly dived into it.

Potter shuddered. Draco shuddered back at him, shoulders shaking, neck throbbing, so while their climaxes weren't anywhere near simultaneous, he thought their movements followed each other's perfectly.

He had been absorbed into Potter's routine, that perfect, smooth movement that made him into such a dancer. For a moment, Draco was mindlessly happy.

Potter came the way he did everything else, in a rush that swept Draco up along with him, and with a look of surprise on his face, as though he didn't know why he alone, of all the people in the world, should be offered such pleasure. Draco enjoyed it, although he only felt the spasmodic thrusts that Potter gave into him and the boneless way he fell over Draco's chest in the second after they happened. He enjoyed it enough to give him an extra edge to the orgasm that he went through a moment later.

It was so brief. But everything was, including the time before his father collapsed into bone and ashes, and Draco intended to savour what he could of it.

*

The Fire meant purity, and undoubtedly that was the reason that the Malfoy ancestors took to it in the first place. In their day, they had been some of the most mindlessly concerned with purity, most sure that somehow, the Muggleborns rising up from the ranks of Muggles would change them, corrupt them, dirty them.

Put them out.

So the Fire came to be, though how and when were hidden, and most of the Malfoys' descendants didn't care enough to look. They cared that the threat of the Fire could linger in the back of the mind, and that even mentioning it, banked, was enough to make their opponents hesitate, a look of fear appearing on their faces.

That was, until even the Malfoys forgot what it had been and what it could do, except as a secret that was passed on, among a score of other secrets, from father to eldest son and heir at the hour of the father's death.

Lucius Malfoy woke it, this Fire that would burn out the impurities of any Muggleborn or half-blood. Of course, in doing so it would consume any Muggleborn completely and leave any half-blood a charred corpse, a precise fraction of bones and skin and muscle--and magic--missing.

That was not the Fire's fault, of course. It did as it had been made to do. It existed. It was. It knew itself, if a magical artefact can be said to know itself, as a force of creation and beauty, and those with pure magic could survive walking through it. Those who could not, one might say, were the lesser life-forms who should never have been born in the first place. 

If you can't stand the heat…

*

They appeared in the middle of a sea of chaos, people running everywhere, shouting and calling. The attack had already begun, Harry thought grimly, but someone must have showed themselves too early, or decided that they wanted the satisfaction of killing with their wands instead of hurling a piece of the Fire and departing. Otherwise, they would have appeared in nothing but the middle of a great silence, and heat on the earth hot enough to burn away skin with a touch. Harry had felt it before.

He dropped Rabastan to the ground and cast a Notice-Me-Not Charm on him. The last thing he wanted was a Burner finding and rescuing their fallen comrade. The best way for Harry and his people to fight the War of the Fire was as one of attrition. Destroy enough of the fanatical pure-bloods who would carry chunks of the Fire as diamonds, and the war would have to cease.

But so far, it hadn't happened, and Harry drew his wand and charged forwards. He was aware of Draco, at his side, doing the same thing.

_If that doesn't show that he's got over his prejudice against Muggleborns, I don't know what will,_ Harry thought in distraction. Ron still didn't trust Draco because he sneered and said the word "Mudblood," but it was his actions that mattered, and here he was.

Ron would probably be unsatisfied because he was attacking in disguise.

And then Harry came around the corner and saw someone he recognized as Pansy Parkinson's mother lifting her hand high, her hair flaring around her head like a halo, turned to blond in the light of the fierce white beams that stabbed through her fingers.

Harry immediately focused on her. There was nothing and no one else in the area half so dangerous, and no one else had performed the time-freezing spells yet, which meant that either they hadn't noticed her--unlikely, with the way the Fire shone--or else they were in no position to do so. He would have to destroy the Fire and stop her any way he could.

He called out the first charm that would bring the frozen moment into being and cut that part of the Fire off from the world, and the fanaticism that it relied on to keep it burning. Harry and his people didn't yet know how the pure-blood Burners transported the Fire's diamonds, because Draco didn't know, but it ceased to exist when it didn't have a Burner to carry and throw it, and that was enough for Harry.

A wave of exhaustion knocked him from his feet. Harry rolled and came back up, but his legs trembled beneath him, and he swayed as he stood there. He cursed in a low, deadly voice when he understood what was happening.

He had used the time-freezing magic once already this morning, to stop Rabastan, and it was a powerful set of spells. He might manage one of them right now, but not the other, and their major tactic against the Burners so far had depended on no one else being able to study those charms long enough to mimic or understand them. He might reveal the whole secret that had kept their side of the war going so far if he failed to perform _both_ spells.

He gritted his teeth and had almost decided to go ahead anyway when Draco in his glamoured disguise appeared beside him and said calmly, " _Non comparere articulo._ " 

The blue corner of frozen time appeared. Harry blinked at Draco. He knew the charm, of course, they all did and so of course the knowledge would have made its way to Draco from the casual conversation of the others even if Harry hadn't made a point of teaching it to him, but he hadn't ever used it.

Draco braced himself now, and his teeth were locked in a grin. " _Coniungo te tempore_ ," he said, and time resumed for Mrs. Parkinson.

Harry didn't even check to make sure that the diamond had disappeared from her hand, as he would have in any other circumstance. He kept his eyes on Draco instead, because he knew that Draco would have alerted him if the spell hadn't worked or something else had gone wrong, and so he was witness to the quick, shy way that Draco turned his head towards him, and then flickered his eyes away again.

Someone else might have missed it. Not Harry. He took a step closer and let his hand rest on Draco's shoulder. "Why?" he whispered.

Draco snorted. "You think I really want to live through a blast here and then have everyone else question me about my undeniably pure blood and my unrecognizable face? There are a few blood traitors with you who would live, and all of them hate me. They wouldn't be any gentler when they realised who I really was." 

Harry shook his head. "Not that. But--I know that you thought the Fire might do something if you tried to interfere more directly than spying for us. You took a risk when you cast that spell. If you can use it to reshape your body, it can also use you, I think you said." 

Draco shifted stiffly and turned his head as though Harry stood on his other side. "I couldn't let you die, either, could I?" he asked in a bored tone. "My evenings would be boring. And you're still my best hope for an end to the war and a cure." 

Harry shook his head a little. Draco fell silent, biting his lip.

Harry had known that he felt more for Draco than he should, when Draco's actions were all constrained by the Fire. He had just had no idea that Draco felt that for him.

"If you don't believe me," Draco said, with an obviously losing attempt to recover his fallen dignity, "then I can always leave." He turned as if he would do just that, and so it was Harry's turn to take a risk.

Again, he hadn't wanted to because he had no idea if it would be reciprocated, and he couldn't imagine it being wanted if it wasn't reciprocated. But the only way to find out if it would be was to take the chance.

"I want you to stay," he said, touching Draco's back with his fingertips in a way that wouldn't restrain him. It was important that Draco be allowed to make the choice. His father certainly hadn't consulted him before dragging him into bondage to the Fire, after all. "I want you to--be here." 

Draco cocked his head and turned around, expression alert but wary. Harry regarded him soberly back, trying to imagine what he could say that would reassure Draco, wondering what would be enough without patronising him.

Then Draco closed his eyes, nodded, and murmured, "All right." 

Harry leaned forwards and kissed him without caring who saw. It was dark, they were all gasping after fighting for their lives or chasing the remaining Burners, who would care or be listened to if they did try to say something about the Saviour’s apparently random fancies of random wizards?

And in that moment, something else changed and shifted within him. He had been working on ways to stop the Fire, when he could spare a moment from preventing the raids and protecting his people. Now he would have a traitor to find as well.

But none of that should prevent him from working on a way to free Draco from the Fire.

Standing there with the knowledge that that diamond could have broken and burned, that the last thing Harry might ever have seen was white radiance filling the night, he wanted that almost as much as he wanted Draco.

*

Of course there were Potter's friends to deal with, after they started sleeping together.

They didn't actually accuse Draco of being a filthy pure-blood who was trying to doom the war effort by making Potter infatuated with him. That had surprised Draco. He had thought it was the first accusation they would try. But perhaps it was simply too obvious for them. Perhaps they had tried it in private with Potter, who'd rejected it.

Be that as it may, Longbottom was the first one who came to Draco, and he came openly, without this slinking about and glaring that Weasley tried, or the threatening eyebrow-lift and stare over the top of a book that Granger seemed to think was intimidating. Draco was leaving Potter's tent one evening when Longbottom stopped in front of him and said, "Malfoy, a word, if you please." He didn't quite sneer when he said _Malfoy_ , a pleasant change from the normal method that Draco thought he could deal with.

"Of course," Draco said. He was proud of himself for being calm, restrained. The Fire leaped in him, sensing, in its vague way, a threat. Draco was never sure how much it understood, but he knew it couldn't be sentient or it would have prevented him from helping Potter in the first place.

He no longer thought that his father, servant and vessel of the Fire, was sentient, come to that.

The Fire did, though, seem to react to his emotions, which was one reason that Draco didn't feel it harassing him to let it loose around Potter. Draco was comfortable and relaxed with Potter, so the Fire was, too. Potter's larger goal of stopping the war and destroying the Fire didn't matter.

With effort, Draco controlled the white flames that wanted to uncoil from his fingers like claws, reminded himself that Longbottom was a pure-blood and the Fire wouldn't harm him anyway, and followed the git over to a part of the camp where the tents clustered with each other like children huddling under the bed from the monster. Longbottom sat on the ground in front of one and stared at him.

Draco didn't sit, because he hadn't been invited. He would be courteous even if no one else would.

"What do you want with him?" Longbottom asked, voice direct as his look. "Is it something that someone else could give you, so that you would go away?" 

Draco didn't pretend not to understand. He smiled and dipped his head. "Getting uneasy, Longbottom?" he whispered. "Is Potter not doing things the way he should, not surrendering and letting you run things?" 

Longbottom's jaw tightened, but he said nothing on that score. He didn't have to, Draco thought. Everyone knew the rumours, or drew the right conclusions. Longbottom had been a hero in his own right after the war with the Dark Lord, the one who had held the rebels together at Hogwarts while Potter was chasing around Britain doing Merlin-knew-what. And then the War of the Fire had come along, and suddenly he was in Potter's shadow again, no longer getting any of the power and glory.

"It has nothing to do with that," Longbottom said. "I've studied the Fire. I know that you can't disown someday hosting it any more than you can disown your father's blood in your veins." 

"I've never wanted to disown his _blood_ ," Draco said. "His stupidity, yes, I would be more than glad not to inherit." 

"I know what the Fire is and does," Longbottom pursued, apparently under the impression that anyone wanted to listen to his drivel. Draco suspected he had been too polite. Always one of his failings. "I know that it needs a human host to break bits of itself off and function beyond that room in the Manor you bank it in. And I know that you'll surrender to it because you have no choice." 

Draco could feel his groin shrivel with fear, chasing away the last remnants of his pleasure with Potter. What Longbottom said was perfectly true. Draco was facing that fate, he couldn't do anything to stop it, and he was _inevitably_ a traitor, not because he wanted to be, but because the Fire and his father wouldn't allow anything else.

But that didn't mean that he was going to cringe and apologize and give in and abandon Potter because of it. And from the way he stared at Draco, Longbottom seemed to fully believe he should do that.

"Until that happens," Draco said, "I'll do what I can." 

Longbottom frowned fiercely. "I had the impression that you cared about Harry. Do you want to break his heart with this?" 

And Draco had to begin laughing at that, and remember that Longbottom, for all that he had been a hero and had seemed to understand the realities of the war--the wars--more than most people Draco had met in the last few months, was still a Gryffindor. He still thought in terms of broken hearts and honour and love and law and _abstractions._

"Do you think," Draco said, recovering enough to shake his head at Longbottom, "that his heart isn't already broken, with the deaths he's seen and the decisions he has to make? Do you think that he doesn't _know_ what you know, because I'm sure that you've explained it to him? You're his friend. You wouldn't keep something like that from him." The stricken look on Longbottom's face, so delicious, so amusing in a world where not much was. Didn't he understand that Slytherins would always understand Gryffindors better than the other way around? And Draco couldn't help but act like the archetypal Slytherin when someone offered him an underbelly so _very_ soft and tempting. "He must know. He's made his decision to stay with me instead of leaving. I've made the same one." 

Longbottom shook his head. "You couldn't ask him to leave," he murmured, apparently in shock. "This is his place." 

"There you go, focusing on irrelevancies again," Draco said. He felt normal again, but tired. "The answer to all your questions is yes or no, as appropriate. I'm going home." 

He started walking. Longbottom scrambled to his feet behind him and tried to say something wonderful, or wounding, or encouraging. Draco didn't know which. He didn't doubt Longbottom's courage, or his loyalty to Harry. Just his ability to understand a situation like this, passing under his nose.

"I thought you wouldn't go home given what your father's done, Malfoy!" Longbottom finally decided to yell.

Draco paused and glanced back with an eyebrow raised, aware that they had an audience now, and not caring that much. Longbottom was the one who had to stay here and endure embarrassment or curiosity from the lookers-on, not Draco. 

"I told you that I wouldn't disown my father's blood even if I had the choice, Longbottom," he said. "And the Manor is still the home of my blood." 

He Apparated then, so he never knew if Longbottom said anything else. 

*

Horrifying, that's what some pure-bloods would say. But pure-bloods have adapted before. Pure-bloods have always been here. When Muggles hunted them, they survived. When half-bloods started gaining power, they welcomed the most powerful into their own ranks and married them so that their dirty blood would be diluted while their talents passed into the hands of their rightful possessors. The children of half-bloods and pure-bloods took after their purer parent. Everyone knew _that_.

Real differences, differences as searing as fire. Perhaps one wouldn't want to light a fire that would consume all the people who had dirty blood and magic, who were coming into your world and claiming a place that they weren't entitled to.

But one could dream. One could look at something like the Fire and close one's eyes and say that, of course, it was horrible, of course no one who was sane would do something like that, or set it free. And no one sane would want to pay the price.

But someone might _dream_. The Mudblood Aurors--they were even there now, in the elite corps, disgraceful--couldn't arrest one for dreaming.

Or for rejoicing inside when the Fire began to spread. Or for hoping that some people would be more amenable, when the ashes settled and they realised that they were still alive, while their more _muddled_ colleagues were dead, to accepting the world as it was, had been, would be.

The way it always should have been.

Go on long enough, and one could begin to believe that the Fire came from a natural source, and functioned on a natural source, despite the evident amount of high magic that it took to keep it burning. One could murmur that, well, of course, it was sad to see such a high percentage of deaths, but there must be a _natural_ difference between Mudbloods and pure-bloods after all, or one wouldn't have a Fire that destroyed one and left the other kind alive.

One could forget that it was magic that had made and sustained the Fire, and that magic obeyed the beliefs and will of its possessor, whether or not they were right.

One could dream about the war and wake up in sweat from nightmares, remembering that one's relatives had been arrested in the great purges that had followed the defeat of the Dark Lord, one's home invaded, one's heirlooms smashed to pieces by Ministry goons who wouldn't _listen_ when one told them that they were only harmless baubles of silver and ivory to make children laugh, and not Dark artefacts.

One could perhaps dream of striking back, looking around an empty house that had once been filled with quiet voices and loud ones, children and ancestors.

One could volunteer to become a Burner, perhaps.

One could dream.

*

"Harry? Are you all right?" 

Harry could see why Hermione had asked that. She had walked into his tent to find him bent over, not maps or memos or the kind of scribbled letters that were sometimes all his spies or counter-raiders could send, but an ordinary magical tome. Well, maybe not so ordinary if you knew that it was a survey of all the magical artefacts, both Dark and Light, that the pure-blood families were known to have owned for the past several generations, but that didn't matter. It was a _book_.

"Yes." Harry smiled at her and then went back to his reading. There was nothing directly in here about the Fire--Draco had once told him that the Malfoys had guarded the very secret of its existence too strictly for that--but there was a surprising amount of information about artefacts that resembled it. Artefacts that were meant to change Muggleborns into pure-bloods, artefacts that were meant to destroy everything that someone found disgusting about another person, artefacts that were meant to somehow "claim" illegitimate children. Harry didn't quite understand that last bit, but he knew it was on the right track, and so he kept reading.

Hermione worked her way around his shoulder. Harry ignored that. Hermione was one of the few people he trusted to be behind him without producing a tense, nervous reaction. Ron, Neville, and Draco were the only others.

"Why that book?" Hermione asked, her words exhaled on a sigh. "Before, when we talked about something like that, you said that we couldn't destroy the Fire because that would destroy Malfoy." 

"I'm looking for a way to free him from the Fire," Harry replied, turning a page. "Once he's free, then we can destroy it." 

There was silence. Harry didn't know if Hermione was in shock or had accepted his words and gone away, but either way, she didn't interfere, so he went on reading. Yes, yes, he thought, there could be something here, something about the best ways to get rid of those artefacts. And plenty of them had been destroyed down the centuries, either by crusading Muggleborns or other pure-blood families jealous of the power they brought to their possessors.

Then Hermione reached out and put a hand on his. Harry blinked and looked up, a bit irritated, but mostly trying to cling to a fast-fading vision of a method that he might use to destroy the Fire. He'd had an idea. It was almost there. It had darted into his mind and then away again, but he thought it would come back.

"You're serious about this," Hermione said. She was paler than Harry thought she should be, but he didn't think it was from fear or anger. Mostly, she kept staring at him as if she was trying to figure him out and couldn't quite manage it.

Harry nodded. "I take it you don't approve?" Hermione and Ron had never been openly hostile to Draco after the first few times that he and Harry had met, but it still didn't stop them from worrying that he would turn out to be more loyal to his family than to Harry, or that Lucius would die suddenly and Draco would become the enemy overnight.

"Not that," Hermione said softly. "I just--I never thought it would last, Harry. Honestly. You hear about wartime romances," she added defensively, as if to excuse herself, although Harry hadn't said anything yet. "Neville and Hannah were together one day, then they split apart the next. And you've heard more than you need to about the problems Ron and I have had." She turned her head to the side.

Harry gently put his hand on her shoulder. He'd heard a lot about it, yes, from both sides, but that was just the way it was right now. 

"So you thought Draco and I would do the same thing?" he asked.

"Wasn't it inevitable?" Hermione swiped at her eyes, but swallowed sturdily enough that no tears actually fell. "I just--I thought it was, Harry. Long-time enemies, brought together by the pressure of the war, I could see. But not this." She waved her hand at the book.

Harry laughed in spite of himself. "So the sight of me studying can change your personal world more than the sight of Draco fighting on our side?" 

Hermione winced and met his stare head-on. She knew as well as he did that his laughter was double-edged. "He's been good for you," she said. "Not just necessary. That was the part I resisted admitting." 

After a moment, Harry nodded and squeezed her shoulder. Then he turned back to his book. He had an idea. He would coax the brief vision he'd had out of hiding and then try to understand it. It had been fleeting, but important.

He didn't find it in the book. Not long after Hermione had left, lips pressed against the back of his neck, and arms wrapped around his waist. Harry leaned back and raised an arm of his own, finding Draco's neck.

"I could have been an assassin, for all you know," Draco murmured into his hair. "I could have killed you before you knew I was there." 

Harry simply turned his head and kissed Draco on the mouth without speaking, then on the cheeks and the chin. When he pulled away again, Draco's lips were parted and his eyes were shut.

"You're not," said Harry. "You found out who the traitor was?" 

It took Draco long moments to open his eyes, which Harry was pleased to see. He liked the way they fluttered and the lashes parted as though Draco was trying to remember what they had been talking about. "Yes," he said, in a dazed tone, and then in a firmer one, "Yes. I discovered that one of your refugees' relatives was seen talking to a Burner the night before last." 

Harry smiled. It sometimes amazed him that Draco was able to gather so much information, but then again, it didn't. The Burners were fanatics who were unable to comprehend that Draco would turn against his family, and besides, they knew that Draco had the Fire in him and would have more of it after his father died.

And he no longer thought he would find any feat Draco performed remarkable. He was remarkable simply on his own.

"Tortured?" Harry asked. "Freely talking?" He slid a hand up and down the back of Draco's neck, and Draco leaned into it with the same lazy motion that a lion might make while being petted.

"Freely talking," Draco murmured. "One of your half-blood soldiers has relatives on the pure-blood side who have more distant relatives who have friends who are connected to the Burners. And...ideals are twisted and tortured in this war, Potter. You know that. It's easy enough to convince oneself that they would get the information anyway, and that they would never hurt your relative. Not _really_. Or to decide that the pure-bloods you know are more important than the half-blood you've never met." 

"I know that." Harry kissed him again and eased him towards the floor of the tent. "But you haven't chosen to behave that way, as good an excuse as you have." 

Draco snorted and slowly, lazily opened his eyes to stare back at Harry. "I'm here because I was angry at my father for taking my choices away. You know that. I didn't decide to be a bloody hero." 

"You are one anyway," Harry whispered, and bowed his head.

It ended with Draco sucking him off, several minutes after Harry had done the same for him, with his fingers up Harry's arse. Harry arched off the ground, twisting back and forth, all his body rippling, his muscles running and surging with the passion that only Draco brought out in him, all his being flowing, leaping like fire to the one end.

As Draco lay curled around him afterwards, in heavy, somnolent stillness, Harry found his thoughts drifting and twisting, too. Like fire, fire waving in heavy curtains, blue and red and gold and white, fires dancing together, bowing, burning…

His eyes snapped open, and his whoop woke Draco, who made him pay for it.

*

 

Potter had slipped into the role of a hero so easily, and Draco had never understood how he could do it.

He understood that he _was_ doing it. That was clear enough. And even if Draco had despised Potter for acting the hero twice as much as he had pretended to in school, then that emotion would have slipped away the moment he realised that the grandiose behaviour wasn't an act, but part of Potter's very soul.

What Draco didn't understand was the how. How did Potter act as though he believed everything would be all right? How did he stand up to those who wanted to give in because it would be so much easier? How did he support everyone and still keep slogging through his own despair, be open and giving enough to offer Draco open arms and a willing mouth and a hard cock?

Other people might say that last sacrifice was self-interest only, or due to the pressures of the war. Draco knew differently. Potter's eyes as they stared up at him, brilliant green and fixed on Draco's face, alight with pleasure in his pleasure, would have told him the truth if he had ever doubted it. 

It was one day in the sixth month since he had started acting as Potter's spy that Draco understood. He woke up, meaning to leave; he had already spent too long wrapped with Potter in the sheets of a small temporary bed they had made near the back of his tent. All the beds they shared were temporary, disturbed by a shout, a report, a new group of Mudbloods who had thought they could hold out staggering in with tales of ashes and horror.

Potter didn't wake up at once the moment he moved, which was unusual. Instead, he lay there, breathing, one arm flung out around the empty space Draco had just moved from. His breathing was quiet, undisturbed, the breathing of someone young and healthy. It bothered Draco sometimes, when he thought that they would both be twenty soon.

Draco waited. Only later did he acknowledge that he was waiting for Potter to roll over and hug his arm to himself, shutting Draco effectively out.

But Potter didn't do that. He kept his arm stretched wide instead, and Draco could have slipped back under it if he wanted to. He could have lain down and closed his eyes, and Potter wouldn't have known he was gone. He would have pulled him closer, instead, and Draco could have felt warmth beneath his cheek, cloth, skin, rushing blood. He could have listened to Potter's breathing until he went back to sleep.

_Even in his bloody_ sleep, _he expands._

And that was the way he survived, Draco understood now. He didn't try to maintain himself in self-possession and aloof dignity, the way that Lucius had taught Draco he always should. Potter had more porous boundaries than most people, and he could flow into them and draw strength from them because they existed and were strong. 

He didn't try to stand too much on his own. Draco reckoned he should have known that already, seeing Potter's close friendships, but he hadn't, and it had made no difference before.

Now he understood.

Draco laid his fingers along Potter's temple before he departed. It was the only gesture he could make to somewhat express the flames that were leaping through him and which had no outlet otherwise.

The Fire tried to burn Potter through his fingertips. Draco pulled them back before that could happen and left Potter, still reaching, still expanding.

*

The Fire burned brightly, the brightest thing in the world, the brightest thing in the Manor, competition with the sun. Send up enough smoke from the walls that could not contain it as long as it was awake, and it would blind the sun eventually.

As far as it could be said to be contented with anything, the Fire might be contented with that.

Its flames wreathed around Lucius, cradling him. Someone looking at him would see blackened bones, a charred version of a skull that still had the living eyes. The Fire invested the eyes with the living light of the soul. They would be the last things to die, the last things to decay. There were some who might give thanks for that.

No one knew if Lucius would have. No one knew what Lucius's thoughts were now. Yes, he issued commands, but they were desires that came from flame, not rooted in human flesh and blood any longer. 

Let blood boil away, flesh crumble and char and the human brain somehow survive, and this might be what you would have.

Others might see their fate in such a skeleton. Not the Muggleborns or the half-bloods, of course. If the Fire spread far enough, they would be extinct. And Muggles didn't have to worry about such a thing because they contained no magic in their bodies that could support such a joining. Not that they might not die anyway if some aspiring pure-blood decided to conquer them, of course. But for the moment, focused on winning the war over their own kind, the Burners did not speak of such things.

Magical artifacts were bound to one bloodline only, and could only choose their owners, their vessels, their heirs, from among the members of that family. That was well-known.

Except that the Fire could burn away impurities, if it wished. And if it could change the nature of the world, the nature of flesh and blood might not be too much for it.

There might be some who would give much for Lucius's power, seated on a throne in the centre of the Wizarding world, the flames rising around him and transforming into heat and light the higher they rose. 

There would always be people who saw the throne and not the heat.

*

"There's no way that this can work." Draco's voice was a snap, his eyes lowered while his wand scratched out random patterns in the dirt in front of him.

Harry waited until Draco had looked up at him. "Yes, there is," he said gently. "You know that the spells resemble the one you're under because of the Fire. You know that my proposed solution is going to work." 

"Only because you're _mad_." Draco turned his back and began to pace the tent, this time straightening so that his wand banged against his leg. Harry watched him, taking in the strength in the set of his shoulders, the way that Draco kept the magical shimmer of the Fire around his skin under control with no thought at all. Did he have a clue how strong Harry saw and thought him, how wonderful he was? Probably not. He would be used to thinking of himself as a helpless victim, the way others saw him, the heir to Lucius who could do nothing to halt the advent of the Fire.

Many people had argued with Harry in the last few days. Ron had worried about the practicalities of the plan. Hermione had worried about the theory, and then started looking up the ingredients to anti-burn pastes. Neville had asked Harry if he was sure several times, all the while watching Draco with a jaundiced eye, as if he thought it possible that Draco could have influenced Harry to do this against his will.

_Well, that's not impossible if your default position is that Draco is already unduly influencing me,_ Harry had to admit.

But he knew that wasn't the case, so he had held firm against all of them, and then finally told Draco the plan. Of course he objected, and his objection was the one that could ruin the whole plan, because it needed his co-operation.

"It has to be your choice." Something in Harry's voice, maybe the sheer, quiet steadiness of it, made Draco turn around and stare at him. "But you should remember that I want to do this, and I would never have agreed just so that I could mindlessly die. I do believe that it's the best chance of rescuing you. I would never have proposed it otherwise." 

Draco's eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared as if he was going to start yelling. His low, imperious tones revealed that he was clinging onto sanity, but barely. "You're telling me that all of this comes down to how much I trust you?" It was a fierce whisper.

Harry had thought of some other ways that he could put it, but all of them asked for even more personal commitment from Draco than Harry had already asked. In the end, he shrugged, nodded, and said nothing.

Draco said a single word, flat and unencouraging, and the table next to Harry caught fire. He put it out quickly, hissing at Draco, "That could have hurt somebody, you wanker!" 

"You caught it in time," Draco said, and his eyes shut. "You always do." A beat of silence, and then, "You don't know what you're asking me to sacrifice, Harry." 

Harry felt as though someone had jammed a lance of fire into his bones. He couldn't remember the last time Draco had called him by his first name. If ever. He didn't know if half-wordless grunts in the midst of passion counted.

"Then I'm asking now." His voice was as gentle as he could make it, though mostly because of his weakness.

Draco still said nothing for long moments, but resumed his pacing back and forth. Harry watched him and waited. He felt oddly confident, for some reason. He had had his revelation about Draco's probable feelings already, but that didn't mean Draco would be willing to watch Harry kill his father, and possibly kill himself, in an attempt to free him.

And it didn't mean that Draco had ever revealed this clear a glimpse into himself.

"You don't know how much I've used you and your movement as a reservoir of hope," Draco whispered. "I could tell myself, up until the day when it happened, that you would find some way to free me." Harry opened his mouth, but Draco started speaking more quickly and fiercely, and Harry had to fall silent perforce. "All the time, I knew I would die before that could happen, but it helped me get through the day, and pretend that there was a chance." 

"Then why--" 

Draco turned around and stared at him. Harry's words dried up under his eyes. He made an apologetic gesture, and Draco nodded regally back and went on.

"Now that that chance's actually here, I don't have the reservoir of hope anymore. I have to go ahead with it, and I don't know if it will actually work or not. If it doesn't, there's one possibility, one form of _potential,_ gone." 

Harry thought he understood now. His own birthdays with the Dursleys had sometimes been like that. As long as the day wasn't here, he could pretend that they might remember this time, that they might get him gifts or at least let him eat a slice of cake. But when the morning dawned and it turned out they hadn't, his disappointment about the ending of his fantasies was almost worse than the disappointment about the empty day.

"You do understand." Draco's voice was soft now, and he came nearer, long enough to run his fingers down Harry's cheek. "Good. I wasn't entirely sure that you would." 

Harry caught his hand and turned it to suck a kiss onto Draco's palm. "You said that you had to go ahead with it," he said, when Draco's eyes were lightly glazed as if with a dusting of snow. "Now?" 

Draco shut his eyes and nodded, then. "What you say makes too much sense," he whispered. "And what else is there, if I try to hold onto the hope? I _know_ that, sooner or later, the Fire will eat my father and I'll be its slave. This fate that you're offering me, no matter how unknown, has to be better than that." 

Harry started to nod encouragingly, but then Draco whipped around and caught his arm, leaning towards him with wide, wild eyes. His lips were right beside Harry's face, and Harry, although he tried to twist his head to look at Draco, couldn't quite manage it.

"Except in one way," Draco whispered. "If you die doing this, hope and purpose die with you." 

Harry knew that was the greatest gesture of trust Draco had ever given him, greater than the speaking of his first name--showing that he cared about what Harry was doing, that it mattered to him. He leaned back on Draco's shoulder and said nothing for long moments.

Of course, in the end it turned to Draco snarling in his ear and dragging him to the floor so they could fuck properly. Most of his intense feelings turned into sex in the end. Harry didn't mind that. It was the way Draco was.

And it _was_ bloody great sex.

*

The Fire whispered to Draco in his dreams.

Draco sometimes woke from sleep with the thought that it wouldn't be so bad to give in and do what his father was doing. He knew that his own inadequacies, fears, and foolish worries would be burned up in that flame. He would never again have to think about what he was doing as a spy for Potter, whether he was betraying his family or the family dignity. (He told himself that those thoughts were stupid, but he did occasionally have them). He wouldn't have to worry about his mother, who had fled the same night Lucius called the Fire, and whether she could ever come back to England. The Fire was _uncomplicated,_ and Draco had seen enough by now to crave a simpler life, the seduction and the promise of it. Surely it couldn't be so bad to do that, not when the Fire would burn out his personality and leave him incapable of regretting or wondering.

That was the worst, the blind, bloody _wonder_. Wondering if his father retained any awareness inside his half-consumed shell. Wondering if it would hurt when the Fire finally closed in and took him.

Wondering if he and Potter shared anything more than a few intense moments that, thanks to the pressure of the war, felt more deeply intimate, more deeply _earned_ , than they really were.

He went to Potter one day, full of those dreams, half-minded to tell him that he would be disappearing soon. Lucius had to be near the end. His body was crumbling day by day. His jaw had already gone. His eyes remained, of course, but Draco knew they would remain until near the end. The Fire _liked_ human eyes. It could see out of them.

He could continue spying for Potter, but what did it matter? Nothing could change. And Draco was growing tired of fighting.

He lifted the tent flap and stepped into the path of a curse that nearly killed him.

"Shit!" Potter's voice was a cracked shout, filled with tears and rage. " _Protego!_ " 

The silvery shield that formed in front of Draco caused the curse to crumble into floating flakes of ash. Draco blinked, feeling the Fire stir in his eyes and jab little roots of lightning into his brain. It probably wouldn't have let even Potter's magic hurt him, but Draco didn't want to find that out for certain. 

He stepped out from behind the shield and stared at Potter.

The table that usually stood in the middle of Potter's tent was cracked in two, by what Draco interpreted as a Blasting Curse that had also done the kind of damage normally associated with acid. The floor was charred and trampled, a mixture of singed grass and smoking canvas. A few sad scraps of parchment that might have been a note or a map skidded around Potter's feet, caught in an eddy of wind that originated from Potter himself. 

He didn't seem to notice, and for good reason. His hair was a mess, standing on end. His eyes were so red that Draco was stunned he could see out of them. His hands were clenched into fists, and his breathing was harsh enough to make Draco think he was on the edge of those tears he'd heard just now.

"Malfoy," Potter said curtly, and turned away from him.

It was the first time he had done that recently, Draco thought, watching him with eyes that were wide almost despite himself. He couldn't remember the last time Potter had called him by his surname, in fact. He used the first because he understood how Draco felt about his family legacy after what his father had done.

"Potter," Draco said tentatively, and eased forwards, reaching out one hand. Then he realised that he had no idea what to do with it, and dropped it, shaking his head. Perhaps asking simple questions would be easier than using a touch. "What happened?" 

Potter whirled around again and stalked towards Draco until they stood a few inches apart from each other, their noses literally brushing. Draco held his breath, not wanting to incite Potter further, and then realised that was stupid, and let it go. Potter was already so riled up that Draco couldn't imagine what would do _more_ damage.

"Your father did," Potter whispered. "Your Fire did. To one of the refuges we set up outside London. There's nothing--nothing left. _Fuck!_ " He screamed the last and unleashed a spell that nearly took Draco's ear off.

Draco listened for a moment to make sure that the spell hadn't actually set the tent on fire, as he had been afraid it would, and then moved into Potter's personal space, pinning his wand arm against his body. Potter stared at him, confused and panting. His adrenaline could turn into a fight at any moment, Draco understood.

"Show me," Draco whispered.

"You don't want to see it," Potter said, and turned away, ending the contact between their bodies.

Draco panicked, and seized hold of him again, although that resulted in Potter's wand being pressed against the inside of his arm. He knew that if he allowed Potter to put distance between them now, it would mean never overcoming it again. He and Potter might still fuck, but Potter would see him inevitably as the representative of the force that had slaughtered his people instead of saving them.

"Yes, I do," Draco said, right into Potter's ear. He increased the pressure of his grip when Potter instinctively started to struggle free. "You don't understand. I am a slave of this as much as any of the people my father kills, but it's easier for me to ignore the consequences. _Show_ me the consequences, so that I can remember them." 

Potter stared at him and shook his head. "But why would you want to?" he asked. "I know that you don't care." 

Draco blinked. "If you believe that, then why do you spend time around me?" 

Potter sighed and reached up, smoothing his hand over the singed edges of Draco's hair. Draco hadn't felt it happen. Potter's latest curse must have come closer to him than he thought. "I'm sorry," Potter whispered. "I just--you're risking your life even though it's for the wrong reasons, even though you don't care anything about people like us, half-bloods and Muggleborns. I accept the actions, and don't look too far into the reasons." He gave Draco a half-smile. "In fact, that might make it nobler, that you risk your life for us even when you don't really believe in our cause." 

Draco narrowed his eyes. He would have made fun of Potter if Potter had thought he'd become a spy out of _compassion_ , but to have it assumed that it was automatically the other way around was weirdly insulting.

"Listen to me," he said fiercely, lowering his voice so that no one else could overhear him, though no one else was in the tent. "I'm occasionally capable of a finer impulse. And he's still my father, but it's _not_ my Fire. I never chose this. I would never have consented to give my life like this, for some kind of crazy experiment." 

Potter studied him with narrowed eyes as though it were incredibly important that he figure out the truth. Draco squinted back, and in the end Potter nodded.

"All right," he said. "Then come with me and look at what they did." 

Draco blinked once before he accepted the invitation. His hand snaked into Potter's, and he clung to his wrist hard enough to make Potter flinch back. But Draco didn't let him go, and after a moment, Potter seemed to relax and accept the link between them as inevitable. He even drew closer, as though he wanted to shelter Draco in his arms against any threat that might try to harm him. Draco closed his eyes with a sigh and leaned his head on Potter's shoulder.

It was a single moment of weakness, unseen by anyone else, since Potter Apparated them away in the next instant. It was the only kind of weakness that Draco thought he could afford.

*

The Fire survived because it presented the people who remembered it, and the Malfoy patriarch who awakened it, with a stunning virtue not present anywhere else in their world.

Simplicity.

Trying to take revenge on too many people involved factors of complication that would quickly reach astounding numbers--too great a number. One had to co-ordinate bribes, and hirings, and Memory Charms, and the suspicions of others, and alibis. And the more people one hired, the more knew one's secret. It was the prime reason that so many pure-blood families had allied themselves with the Ministry instead of attempting to form a power structure outside it, as had happened a few centuries ago. The Ministry represented less risk and less chance of the Aurors hunting them if they were assumed to be part of the same side.

But the Fire gave power, the kind of power that no one could withstand--as long as one's enemies weren't pure-bloods--and the inability for the Ministry to arrest one, since becoming a vessel of the Fire meant the end of trouble and worry. The close embrace of the flames was deadly, but only to a certain part of the personality. One's goals could survive, and the Fire would be happy to serve them.

There were pure-bloods who were eager to pay such a price, to collapse the whole of the world into neat, glittering crystalline halves and array themselves on one side or the other. The world used to be like that, they taught their children, before the Mudbloods invaded and carried complexity with them.

So great a temptation. So great a dream.

The Fire did not, precisely, dream, but if it had, one of the nightmares that it never would have had to suffer from was the lack of willing sacrifices.

*

Harry had chosen the place he had once shown Draco, the location of the refuge that the Fire had burned to ashes. It seemed appropriate that out of the scene of the Fire's greatest victory would grow its defeat.

If they could manage it. If the theory was sound.

But Harry knew that neither Draco nor Hermione would have let it get this far if they thought his theory was less than sound, and they hadn't protested beyond the initial days. Now the moment was here, and Harry led a solemn procession from the Apparition point to the stretch of burned ground. Even now, some heat lingered there.

Ron had raised a point about kindling, but Hermione had reminded him that the Fire burned without it. If they wanted a ritual that stood a good chance of killing off the Fire and releasing Draco, then they had to forego it, too.

Harry stopped when he was, more or less, in the centre of the burned place, and looked slowly around. Grass was growing on it now, he saw, the same dull green fuzz that the Fire seemed to reduce most grass to in this cool summer. Here and there, he saw the tracks of small animal feet. The strong spells that they had eventually put up to keep the Muggles away shone here and there.

Not far away were the makeshift graves for the people who had died here that day--makeshift, because there was nothing left of them to bury. Everyone's ashes were mixed with everyone else's, and despite the pleas of survivors, Harry hadn't allowed anyone to waste time trying to sort them out. When Hermione, their best chance of inventing such a spell, had started weeping as she worked, Harry had firmly ended the project and declared that they would have to have headstones instead.

The headstones bore names, dates, and nothing else, for the most part. Here and there, a cluster of flowers entwined one, but the flowers grew small and stunted, too, in this year of the Fire. Harry looked at the headstones nonetheless, forcing himself to remember what had happened to them, in part to soothe his own mental scars over what they had had to do to the half-blood, Gaius Finellan, who had revealed their location to his pure-blood relatives. They had _Obliviated_ any important information he knew and put him out to wander. The Burners would find him sooner rather than later--if they didn't succeed in breaking the Burners' power here today.

The other reason he looked at the headstones was to steel himself for what he had to do.

He turned back at last, and nodded to Hermione. She gave him a teary smile and walked sideways, lifting her wand. Ron took his place next to her, but several paces apart, and then Neville stood between them but behind, forming the third point of a triangle around Harry. 

Draco stood not far from him, eyes enormous, Fire flickering in them. Harry would have let him help, but there was too much chance that the Fire would sense a genuine threat and react through him.

Harry smiled at him nonetheless. This was the reason he was doing this: Draco, and the risks Draco ran, and the way he had so often come striding into the camp as if he owned it, and how he had spoken so casually of possibly getting found out and consumed by the Fire in punishment. Or having something else even worse happen to him. Harry didn't know if the Fire could actually consume a pure-blood, but it would certainly do _something_ at the bidding of Lucius, if Lucius wanted it to.

Draco wasn't a hero in the sense that Harry had known Neville and Ron and Hermione to be heroes. He didn't do the right thing because it was the right thing to do. He did it because he wanted to, and the wrong reasons might be behind it.

But in a war where so few fought and so many hid or simply stood aside because they hoped that the Fire would sweep past them, that was everything.

Harry filled his mind with that simple, shining conviction, and let it fill his soul in turn, leaking through his limbs, irradiating his body, like his own private Fire. Hermione's voice led the chant behind him, spiralling up and up, the words racing faster. Ron and Neville's voices joined her.

Draco watched, and all the time, Harry filled his memory with images of their time together, to give him the strength to do what he had to do.

He remembered the way that Draco tended to frown in his sleep, tilting his head back and firming his lips as though he was arguing with someone Harry couldn't see. Harry had been wary at first, wondering if that meant that Draco was always going to argue with _him_ , but he had come to take pleasure in it lately, seeing it as a sign of the way that Draco might well defy his father.

He remembered how Draco had looked the first day he came into the camp, determined to spy, but watching for hostility on all sides, nervous as a cat in a room full of dogs. But he had come anyway, and he had looked Harry in the eye and given answers that _sounded_ true. When he was looking at Harry, his caution relaxed, and he seemed to come subtly more alive, as if he had finally found someone he could relate to in ways other than seeing him as a threat.

The chant briefly impinged on Harry's consciousness, the rising and falling words like the calling of gulls. He brushed aside the image impatiently. He had to pay attention to the memories, because what was inside him was more important than what was outside him at the moment.

He remembered the day Draco had stood here, with him, and stared around in silence. That silence had been the greatest tribute he could have offered, and coming as he did from a background that had once approved elimination of all Muggleborns as the right thing to do, he'd had further to come to offer it. Harry had clasped his hand in silent gratitude.

And, because he must, there was the inevitable image of Draco lying on the ground, gasping, his stomach glistening with sweat from another round of biting sex. His shoulders bore scratches when he turned his head, and the side of his neck. Harry had stared at them and then at his own nails. He hadn't known he could be that passionate. Oh, sure, he had pictured sweet and tender love-making, but he'd dreamed of different things once in a while. Not from _him_ , though.

Draco roused that passion in him.

Draco was the only one who could.

Harry opened his eyes, and smiled when he saw the roaring golden fire that had sprung into being in front of him. It burned and flickered above the ground, not burning on fuel any more than the Fire in Malfoy Manor did. Harry reached out one hand, and felt a faint shimmer of its presence against his palm.

That was the problem, though. Right now, this fire, made by Muggleborn magic, hopefully capable of destroying the Fire, didn't have any connection with the earth and no way of making heat. Something needed to be done to feed it.

Harry backed up a step. He saw the aborted motion that Draco made from the corner of his eye, the sweep of his hand that might have been intended to reach out and rescue Harry.

But no one could rescue him when he was intent on a goal, as Draco had said more than once, and Harry had chosen this of his own free will. That was another difference from the Fire in Malfoy Manor, which had seized Draco against his will, and Hermione had said that it might be the most important difference of all.

Harry began to run. The ground blurred under his feet. The air vibrated around him. His friends fell behind, but the image of Draco remained in front of him, burning, shining, glistening with the heat from the fire.

Harry flung himself into the heart of the flames.

*

They appeared on a slight hill in the middle of heat that made Draco flinch, even though, rationally, he knew that it had come from the Fire and so it couldn't hurt _him_. Harry's grip on his hand was hard enough to make him flinch again, but he looked slowly around.

The place could have been peaceful, if you thought about it that way. There were no human sounds, only a few muted birdcalls. The ground was flat around the hill, and if there was no grass, that didn't matter, because there was _nothing_ that rose above ground level--no blackened trees or stones to make it look bleak, either. It was a great, vast, grey, quiet space.

Draco knew it had not been that way only a short time ago.

He squinted, but there was no sign of ashes, no sign of bodies or buildings. He turned to Potter, half-seeking confirmation that they had indeed come to the right place, although he knew they had. Potter responded with a curling lip and a sharp word on his tongue which he visibly swallowed. After a moment, he put his hand on Draco's shoulder and turned him around to face the grass again, while his wand described a swift arc over Draco's head.

The world shimmered and wrenched to the side. Draco tensed, then forced himself to stand still. He recognized this particular spell. It conjured a particular image of a place as it had been at some point in the past--not exactly as clear as a Pensieve memory, but as close as one could come outside that device.

The space suddenly filled with light, colour, sound, and bustle. There were three buildings--infirmary, kitchen, and a shelter for people who needed to sleep out of the wind--many tents, and a discreetly shrouded area over to the side that Draco knew must hold the chamber pots or latrines, whichever they had out here. Children ran madly in circles and chased each other, Crups, Kneazles, scraps of cloth blowing in the wind, leaves, toys their parents had enchanted for them, and whatever else they could find. Hard-eyed soldiers strode past them, ignoring them for the most part. Witches and wizards cooked, cleaned the areas around their tents, set up wards, practiced spells, taught their children, and in general lived as well as they could when they'd been displaced from their homes.

The spell changed. Draco wondered for a moment, as his eyes seemed to heat up, whether the Fire inside him had done it, but then decided that it was Potter's spell. It had that feeling, familiar magic sliding along his skin.

The camp flared. It was brilliant, blinding white, that light, as Draco had known it would be. It shot rays in all directions. It was as if a piece of the sun had fallen to earth and burned there.

It faded.

There was nothing left in its place. Where Draco had expected--even knowing everything he knew about the Fire--bones, singed rags of robes that had escaped the direct heat, and the carcasses of buildings, there was nothing. It was grey. It was silent. It was the place as they had seen it when they first arrived. 

The Fire had burned all those Muggleborns, and the possessions tainted by their touch, down to less than nothing. Purifying the earth, Lucius would have said.

Draco had known that. And it wasn't as though he had been ignorant of the other scenes of slaughter. Potter had spoken of them before. Draco had viewed them from a distance. He had felt the Fire inside him flare in excitement when they happened; Draco could be asleep and still know when the Burners used one of those diamonds.

But seeing it like this--the transition from life to death, from present to past, from presence to _absence_ \--made his breath catch in his throat anyway. He closed his eyes and leaned back against Potter, and kept doing so even though he knew Potter had banished the spell that showed them the images by now.

"Malfoy?" Potter's voice was wary, as if he thought he would have a fainting Draco on his hands at any moment.

"I saw," Draco said, and no more than that. He didn't himself know why that vision had changed him so profoundly, and he didn't think that he particularly wanted to worry about it, either. He turned back to Potter and kissed him on the forehead, then on the cheeks, then on the mouth. Potter responded eagerly, his fingers sliding into Draco's hair.

Draco bit sharply at the corner of his cheek, and then urged him towards the ground. Potter went willingly for a moment, then suddenly tensed and arched back up in a way that Draco knew meant he _wasn't_ lost in physical pleasure.

"Not _here_ ," Potter hissed. "Are you insane?" 

"What better way to show that the Fire that it isn't, can't be, triumphant forever?" Draco countered. "It tried to take away life from this place with a fire that only a pure-blood could survive. We'll bring it back again, with one of us a half-blood, just to drive the lesson home." 

Even as he spoke those words and saw Harry's eyes flash with determination, Draco knew that he was at least partially lying. The Fire wasn't aware of what had happened here, or it would react with fury, doom Harry and claim Draco as its slave. But the Fire didn't take them seriously as a threat, so that wouldn't happen.

Draco, though, needed the reassurance of life and strength returning.

"Yes," Harry said, and kissed him back, and then rolled so that Draco was underneath him. Draco bit his chin, and they wrestled, there in the midst of the drifting grey dust, in the midst of the silence. If it was obscene, at least no one was there to tell them so.

Harry came and made Draco come with a passion that was the same as always, not heightened by the Fire, not changed. Draco lay watching him when he slept, once more, and this time his thoughts were not of the expansion that Harry made towards other souls--he understood that by now--but of the way that he had somehow changed Draco without setting out to do so. Draco looked at the damage of the Fire around them, and then he looked back at Harry and thought about what it _meant_ that Harry was fighting this instead of cowering behind walls, though, as a half-blood himself, he stood to lose his life if the Burners caught him.

All of that had been true before. It was truer now.

It had changed Draco's mind about the need to retain himself as always guarded and always conscious of the fact that he could become the Fire's sacrifice. Because Harry was also the sacrifice, in a way, had been one, could become one, was being one again. He would understand as no one else in the world could.

And Draco could extend understanding where he himself was understood.

*

The Fire burned in dreams long before it burned in the real world.

It burned in the minds of those who stood quietly by, with passive or approving expressions on stiff faces, as Harry Potter was given the Order of Merlin and promised entrance into the Auror program even before he finished his NEWTs. Although Potter had refused that honor, saying that he preferred to be treated like an ordinary student and applicant, it would give some of them no satisfaction. The only thing Harry Potter could have done to satisfy them would have been to die in the cradle.

It burned in the dreams of people who looked around silent homes and imagined them ringing with the laughter of children who did not have to fear Muggles, because there were none left in the world except as the slaves of wizards.

It shimmered and danced in the souls of those who would not mind kneeling to an overlord, as long as they could walk across a clean world and meet no one who did not exactly resemble them in tastes, reverences, and lineage.

It was not everywhere, but it was close enough to everywhere to make many people welcome it when it rose, and to make others fear it with a cringing compliance that was too much like welcome not to make a difference.

It burned bright as hope.

*

They had only dared to do this in the first place because Harry had died in the Forbidden Forest, gone elsewhere, and then chosen to return. Hermione had said that meant he could spring into the fire and endure it as long as he needed to, so that he could make a weapon capable of destroying the Malfoys' Fire.

Harry didn't know why. She had tried to explain it to him, but he got lost at about the third "whereas." He _had_ understood that, just as the Fire would have burned half of him because his father had been a pure-blood and his mother hadn't, this fire would give him the choice between life and death because he was, Hermione explained, caught between the two already, having been Master of Death for a little while and dead once. If everything worked out the way they thought it would, Harry could use some of his own life-force to transform and strengthen this fire.

If everything worked out as they thought it would.

When Harry had leaped, he was surrounded by shining pillars of flame that didn't move. Beneath his feet was a flat, many-sided pavement of orange and red, blue and white. Harry knelt down and rested his hand against it.

On one level, he was aware of immense pain. It beat and flickered around the edges of his body and brain, ready to enter him if he let it. But Harry didn't intend to let it. Instead, he rested the point of his wand against his chest, above his heart, and closed his eyes.

He had to think about the Fire, about the ways that he would change it. And he knew the Fire best through Draco.

Once again, the memories whirled through him, and he absorbed them in all their clashing and changing colour for a time. Then he selected one, the memory where Draco lay against him that first time after they fucked, his eyes wide and blazing and his expression surprised, as if that had never happened to him before.

Harry knew it had. Draco didn't come to him as a virgin. But it was still new, in many ways, and that newness gave Harry a glimpse into what was Draco, independent of his Malfoy blood and the Fire that had invaded his body.

He reached into himself and pulled out the memory, which, when he opened his eyes, was twined around his wand in golden threads similar to the silvery ones that came out of a Pensieve. Harry spun his wand forwards and back, the way Hermione had told him to, and the golden threads loosened and then settled down in front of him, becoming a vortex that turned and rippled in place.

Harry thought again, this time about the way Draco had looked when they made love on the hill near the destroyed refuge, and a second vortex joined the first. And then he thought about the ways that Draco would sometimes row with him, how he had fought beside him, how he had brought information, and the world filled with those gleaming vortexes, almost but not quite the colour of the fire around him.

Harry reached out a hand and gathered the nearest one up. It continued turning on his palm, and he let his breath out slowly. Hermione hadn't been sure that he would be able to touch these constructions of pure magic the way he needed to, to complete the ritual.

The next part was a work of imagination, although the vortices would aid him. Harry stood up and placed the one he held on his left shoulder, then gathered the second one for his right. The rest moved nearer, drawn by their companions, and spun violently near his feet.

Harry bowed his head and closed his eyes. He could envision what would happen to him if he messed up. Hermione had used the word "splattered," and she often chose the right ones. And it would demoralise his side if he went into the fire and never came back out.

It would condemn Draco.

Harry lifted his wand above his head and formed, as hard as he could in his mind, the image of a brilliant white fire that burned tamely and quietly, sending up no smoke. If he was going to create a flame that would replace the Fire, it had to be like the original in some way, and the colour was the easiest.

Harry went on working, building, until the shine of the flames in his mind hurt his sight in the same way that the Burners' diamonds often did. Then he envisioned the fire landing on Draco in a rain of embers and burning harmlessly.

It was hard work. Among other things, Harry had seen the Fire's effect so often that it was hard for him to picture a similar fire not doing much damage. His mind twisted and bucked, trying to replace the calm image he was aiming for with one of Draco's flesh blackened, seamed and warped under the pressure of the heat.

Harry bore down against his own impulses, his own fears, his own hesitations, because they were his biggest enemies right now. The ancient Malfoy who had created the Fire had made it to do one thing and one thing only, one that was impossible if you believed that there was really no difference in purity between wizards, as Harry did. And he had managed it, despite the difficulty of the task.

Harry was no less stubborn, no less dedicated to his end. He would _make_ it work.

The tendons in his wrists ached. His shoulders hurt as though he had spent the day hauling a cart up a steep track via a yoke. His neck muscles bulged, and sweat coursed down the sides of his face, and he grunted and barked in low, huffing gasps that broke from him as though someone was tormenting him.

He could hear all that. He could feel all that. And yet he went on bearing down, striving to bring something new into the world through the pressure of his images and his magic. Nothing else.

Nothing else would work.

The world shimmered and trembled and spun around him like a curtain of heat. Harry thought he must have opened his eyes at some point, though he didn't remember when. The pavement and the pillars at the heart of the fire danced crazily in his vision, and then the white fire he wanted, the calm, tranquil one, appeared, burning a short distance away.

All he had to do was stretch his hand out and grasp it.

But the distance was immense, short as it might seem or look. Harry went on straining until he could feel his fingers ready to rip free from his hand. He went on reaching, and still the distance taunted him. The gap between imagination and reality wasn't as easy to close as he had thought it might be at first.

_If it was easy to rescue Draco, then it wouldn't be worth doing,_ he thought stubbornly, and went on straining.

The distance suddenly vanished in a puff much like a puff of steam, and then the flames were sheeting past Harry, white ones that he could see with his eyes open. He turned around in wonder, noticing that the golden vortices had vanished. They had grounded and supported his magic when he needed them, but he no longer did.

This was the fire he had summoned. He stood within it, since it had taken the place of the bonfire that he'd jumped into.

Harry felt a moment of doubt. This fire was _also_ supposed to be a magical artefact that would take the place of the Malfoys' Fire. Wasn't it supposed to be far away, burning where that Fire was, in the vaults beneath the Manor? He hadn't asked Hermione about that because he was much more focused on what he needed to do, but--

And then, so suddenly that he reeled, he was standing outside the fire again. Harry blinked and stared around. People were looking at him, his people. Yes, this was the burning ground he had vanished from in the first place.

But the bonfire was gone.

Harry turned around again just as Draco screamed in pain, and sagged to his knees. Harry surged towards him, aware of a few differences in the way he seemed to run. Well, he had been in a world composed partially of magic and partially of his mind until a few seconds ago.

He seized Draco in his arms and held him close, feeling his skin burn as though he had fever. He leaned nearer and kissed Draco on the forehead, murmuring words that Draco wouldn't be able to hear even if he could pay attention, muffled as they were against his skin.

Hermione was beside him, her eyes wide. Harry took her hand and squeezed it, and felt Ron lean against him from behind, his hand in the middle of Harry's back. Neville hovered on the other side of Hermione. He had become nearly as close to Harry as Ron and Hermione in the last few months, since he was one of the few pure-bloods willing to fight the Fire.

Aside from Draco.

_Live, please live,_ Harry thought, holding Draco tightly against him, trying to will this to happen the same way he had willed the bonfire to change into a magical replacement for the Fire. It had had accomplished one thing, then Harry didn't see why he couldn't accomplish the other. He wanted it so much more.

It was shameful, perhaps, that he wanted Draco's life more than he wanted the end to a war, but that was the truth, and there was no reason to say otherwise. Everyone would know that he was lying anyway.

Draco at last stirred in his arms and gave a little moan. He opened his eyes, and Harry caught his breath. He had feared that he might see a different kind of fire burning in them as the Fire moved to claim its latest victim. Draco had seemed certain that it would sense a threat, after all.

But his eyes looked more normal than they had in months, a bright grey without the starry shine. He smiled hesitantly up at Harry, and then seemed to realise other people were around them and struggled to resume his indifferent mask. Harry ignored that.

"Has the Fire left you?" he demanded.

"I--yes," Draco said. He seemed resigned to Harry's arm around his shoulder when he realised that Harry wouldn't let him draw away, and only stood straighter and gave Hermione, Ron, and Neville all an imperious glance, as if to say that he wouldn't tolerate someone else presuming to be on familiar terms with him. "It's strange. It feels as though the place where it burned still has something there, but a softer flame. One that will never come to the surface." His face wrinkled, and he touched his forehead, his chest above his heart, and then his lips. Harry caught and kissed his hand.

Draco held his gaze, and for a moment, it was as if they were alone in one of the places they had sometimes met to trade information.

Harry gazed back. Hermione's words about the intensity of wartime relationships and how they could change rang in his ears, but he didn't intend to back down or away if Draco didn't, and he let that realisation shine in his gaze.

"Remind me later to tell you how much I wish this could have been accomplished by different means than your springing into the heart of a roaring fire," Draco said, his voice so low that Harry had to learn nearer to make out all the words.

"I know," Harry said. "I wasn't too fond of it myself." 

"Then you won't do it again." Draco spoke with a simple, calm assurance that told Harry he expected to be obeyed because he expected to be in Harry's life for a good time to come. Harry smiled back at him. 

He knew this wasn't the time or the place--or Draco the person--for passionate declarations of love. He was more than happy to accept this instead.

For a moment, they stood there, wrapped up enough in each other that Harry could almost ignore Hermione's impatient fidgeting. Then she coughed and, looking from one of them to the other, said, " _Well_? Don't you want to go and see if the Fire was destroyed?" 

"It left me," Draco said, looking up with a blink, as if he had thought that Hermione would automatically understand all the things he was thinking without him having to explain them. "I think that's a good sign that it is." 

"But we can't be sure if it left your father and your home," Hermione said. "I think we need to be sure." She was already turning on her heel, the Apparition co-ordinates for the Manor apparently in her head. Well, they would be, Harry considered, given that she had been tortured there.

He felt weak and giddy. He saw Ron and Neville staring at him, and laughed.

"Is that it, then?" Ron asked softly. "Is that the end of the war?" He sounded shocked more than anything. Harry knew the feeling. "Just like that?" 

"It wasn't just like that," Neville said, before Harry could. He hesitated, then reached out and pulled back the sleeve of Harry's shirt, keeping a wary eye on Draco. A faint thrill ran through Harry when he realised that people would have to start doing things like that, now, if they were really going to accept Draco as a permanent part of his life. "I think that Harry paid the price." 

Harry looked down. A large burn mottled his shoulder where the first vortex had danced. It didn't hurt him, but when Harry reached out and hovered his hand above it, he could feel the faint, distant thrum of magic from it, the way he sometimes could from his scar when he lay alone in the darkness with only his heartbeat for company. He shook his head in wonder.

He looked up, to find Draco's eyes fastened on the burn. "You're scarred by all your wars," he finally whispered, bringing his gaze back to Harry's. "I'll never know how you have the courage to continue with them." 

"I hope not to have to fight another one," Harry said simply. If Draco couldn't speak the words yet, then he thought _he_ was ready. "But really, what kept me going through the last part of this one was you." 

A silence. Ron backed away as though the words were sludge that could get on him. Neville stood looking back and forth between the two of them, not quite concealing a smile.

Draco stared a touch too long, then stepped forwards and cramped his fingers into Harry's hair, jerking him into a kiss that involved teeth. Harry gave back as good as he got.

It would take him some time to realise the war was over, as Ron had begun to. It would take Draco and him even longer, perhaps, to learn how to relate to each other without the Fire looming in the background.

_Who knows? I might be good at fighting for him and horrible at fighting with him._

But that was in the future, and for now, they had other things to do. Harry linked his arm through Draco's. "Let's go to the Manor." 

*

Draco hadn't bothered to have many dreams of the future since the Fire. Why should he? He knew he would end like his father: sitting on the same throne, eaten from within by the same flames, driven by the same alien imperatives. The only uncertainty was when it would begin, when end.

He had once dreamed of a family in which he could be supreme as Lucius was supreme to Draco, or had been. He didn't particularly want to model the role that Lucius had played after the Dark Lord came back. But there was no Dark Lord now. He thought he could indulge in his fantasies of domination, enact them when he wanted, and no one would be hurt. His wife and children were faceless blurs. Some people would take their places as easily as others.

There was not a Dark Lord, but there was a Fire, and that had smoked Draco's dreams underground for some time.

After Potter--after the grass--after Potter, Draco began to dream again. The dreams were as vague as before. Sometimes he thought that they would be in the Manor; sometimes he pictured a screaming fight in some remote location that faded into a blur of trees and houses; sometimes he imagined a tiny flat somewhere in Muggle London that he would have to pretend to like.

But the person with him always had Potter's face.

It was an underground shifting, an underground change. Draco knew no one he could share it with. Potter's friends weren't his, his father was--unreachable, and he would never show himself to Potter in that way, just in case Potter didn't feel exactly the same and decided to mock Draco, or became too serious. Either outcome could be disastrous.

But the fantasies existed, softly, under the surface, and gave him more strength--which made him take more risks, which made him get more attention from Potter, which made him want more.

Certain emotions, Draco thought, were a self-sustaining cycle. But he might want this one to go on.

Perhaps. If he could admit it to himself.

*

The Fire was extinguished, in the special sense that one could say something was after it had changed its nature. It burned white and calm, dreaming. After Hermione Granger cast several spells on it, she still wasn't sure what its new nature was, but she could say that it wouldn't destroy any Muggleborns who touched it again--a fact she proved by sticking a hand in it--and she could look forward to several years of studying it.

The world changed slowly. There were still Burners who didn't believe in the changed nature of the Fire, and tried to use their diamonds. They had to be captured and subdued. There was a Ministry to put back together, a public to calm, reporters to placate, tensions between factions to try and ease.

The work didn't cease. It was no longer the work of war, but it might be the work that it took to prevent another one.

There was an end to a certain burning, skeletal figure on a throne, and a quiet, decent burial. There were people in the Manor again, shifting back and forth, rowing with loud voices, slamming doors, writhing on beds, shouting with laughter, shrieking at each other, and then denying the shrieks, arguing politics long into the night.

There were people who rose up hotly denying that their Saviour could love the son of the man who had almost destroyed the world. There were several rather spectacular confrontations that ended in the kind of pranks that left the protestors dangling from tree branches in their pants. There were then some rather quieter protests in owls and over tea, which the people who lived in Malfoy Manor were pleased to ignore.

The world was burned. But the grass could return to cover burned spots; memories could turn green rather than grey.

Attitudes didn't change as easily. Some of the tensions simply went underground and sent up smoke that signalled that, somewhere, a fire was still burning and might someday have to be burned out again.

Many fires might burn, in their time, without burning out.

The End.


End file.
